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Overview

The U.S. State Department Central Files are the definitive source of American diplomatic reporting on political, military, social, and economic developments throughout the world in the 20th century. Concentrating exclusively on those Central Files that have not been microfilmed by the National Archives or other publishers, UPA's microfilm editions of the Central Files nonetheless dwarf the State Department's very selective volumes of the Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS). Containing less than one percent of the material in the Central Files, FRUS focuses on U.S. relations with individual countries but does not include coverage of many of the key topics to which the majority of the original files are devoted. Each part of the Central Files contains a wide range of materials from U.S. diplomats in foreign countries: special reports on political and military affairs; studies and statistics on socioeconomic matters; interviews and minutes of meetings with foreign government officials; court proceedings and other legal documents; full texts of important letters, instructions, and cables sent and received by U.S. diplomatic personnel; voluminous reports and translations from foreign journals and newspapers; and countless translations of high-level foreign government documents. This collection deals primarily with the decline and fall of King Saud, son of the founder of the modern Saud dynasty. Subsidies to the revolutionary movement in Algeria, wasteful government expenditures, corruption, and large sums of money spent by the royal family for personal use took their toll on Saudi Arabia's economy in the late 1950s. This collection records the government's efforts to bring the economy under control, which included turning the reins of power over to Crown Prince Faisal. The documents include analyses of the devaluation of the riyal, the announcement vesting Faisal as the chief domestic policy maker, and reports on austerity measures taken to balance the budget and stabilize the currency.

Romantic. Affirmative. Rhetorical. The poetry of Dylan Thomas urged readers to ponder life as they never had before. Researchers now have access to a concordance and word list keyed to the 1978 printing of Dylan Thomas: The Poems, edited by Daniel Jones.